Monitoring WiFi channels

Our home WiFi is pretty good, with a decent signal across the house, but there are occasions in the evening where performance is a bit inconsistent compared with the daytime. Not normally a major problem as we use homeplug for devices like TVs, PVRs, Blu-ray (iPlayer, YouTube etc) and music. We save WiFi for laptop/tablet browsing.

This got me thinking... why the WiFi performance inconsistency? We live in a cul-de-sac so surely not 'that much' interference from fellow neighbours? I needed to check, so downloaded inSSIDer 2, a free open source tool that 'scans the waves' for WiFi points in your area.

I installed it and ran for a few minutes (you can leave it running over 24 hours if you want and see all access points that have been switched on over that period).

As you can see from the screenshot, we are not on our own. Our access point is the one in red (PoorSignal, yes that is the SSID ho ho) and you can see that we are competing with 7 or so other access points in our spectrum - although we run on channel 4, that actually spans into neighbouring channels, see the graph, namely channels 1, 4, 6 and 7 in this case.

I'll leave it running for a while and then I will try changing my channel to a less congested area. Of course there are lots of other factors that affect performance (other devices, walls, mirrors etc) but lets see how it goes.

Give it a go!